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The Japanese tsunami swept the Libyan civil war out of the news, just as
the violence in Libya swept the far more consequential Egyptian
revolution out of the news before it. That's how we roll in the
mainstream media. There is an incessant tide of undifferentiated
cataclysms; we rush to the sound of the guns and the natural disasters,
especially if there are pictures. But all bang-bang is not equal. There
are times, as in the case of Libya, when gunfire obscures more important
news. Before the historic Japanese catastrophe changed the cable-news
conversation, Libya was careering toward an American overreaction.

The peripheral importance of Libya was bloated by several factorsthe passions in the streets seemed every bit as vital on television as
those in Egypt; Muammar Gaddafi, in full flagrance, demanded the sort of
unwarranted attention that a fender bender on the other side of the
highway doesbut the contending forces were rival tribes, about
which we knew little. Barack Obama foolishly raised the stakes by saying
the dictator had to go, which in turn led to daily media pressure: Why
is he still there? What are you doing about it? Won't it be embarrassing
if he won't go? What credibility will the American President have then?
And the media spotlight was quickly filled by the President's opponents,
who see every moment of hesitant policymaking as a sign of weakness
rather than prudence. (See pictures of Muammar Gaddafi's Tripoli.)

All of this combined to create a policy sandstorm that obfuscated the
truly astonishing events taking place in the Middle Eastand where
the Administration's real interests should lie. "What happens in Libya
stays in Libya," a Middle Eastern diplomat told me. "What happens in
Egypt affects the entire region." The constant National Security Council
meetings about Libya, the discussions at the U.N. and NATO and the Arab
League were all a diversionas was the prospect of spending
billions on (yet another) military campaign in an Islamic country, which
would have far less lasting impact than spending those same billions on
a well-planned and coordinated development program for the countries in
the region with the largest influence and population, starting with
Egypt.

The revolution in Egypt isn't over. It has barely begun. The military is
in power, as it has been, essentially, for the past 60 years. And a
crisis is coming, a classic crisis of rising expectations: What happens
three months from now when life hasn't changed in any appreciable way
for the hundreds of thousands of young people who took to the streets in
Cairo? More than 60% of the population in Egypt is under the age of 30;
those demographics are common in the region. An estimated 25% are
unemployed. (See pictures of Libya's rebels as they suffer a setback.)

These are the sort of calculations that caused President Obama to call
National Security Council staffers Dennis Ross, Samantha Power and Gayle
Smith into his office last summer. "He had his doubts that the Middle
East status quo was sustainable," said one of those at the meeting. "He
wanted us to come up with a long-term policy. He said, 'Don't avoid the
hard questions.' Believe it or not, we finished our report the week that
Tunisia exploded." The report concluded that the U.S. should support
movements that called for peaceful reform and oppose any violence
directed against those movements. This was a position guaranteed to
offend some longtime Middle Eastern allies, like Saudi Arabia, but it is
the policy that Obama has essentially followed. The rush of revolutions
has created sticky short-term security questions, as in Libya, but the
Obama study left one crucial question unanswered: Is there anything that
can be done, quickly, to put the young people in Tahrir Square, and
elsewhere in the region, to work?

The Obama Administration is studying various ways to help but is
constrained by a lack of foreign aid money and the lugubrious reality of
economic reform. There is an alphabet soup of sleepy international
agencies that have traditionally been boggled by the Middle East's
inability to create a thriving economy outside the oil business. There
is talk of free-trade zones and seed money for small businesses. A
better idea, bubbling up from the Gulf, would be to establish a Middle
East Infrastructure Bankpushed hard by the U.S. and funded by the
lush sovereign wealth funds run by oil-rich countries in the region, as
well as China and Europeto move quickly toward paving roads and
building housing, followed by larger projects like power plants. The
cost to the U.S. might be about the same as two weeks of the Afghan war
for the next 10 years. But something must be done, and soon, lest Tahrir
Square fill again, six months from now, with protesters who are far less
peacefuland their radicalism catch fire across the Middle East.